Nutrition Games with a Purpose Starter Project

Background

The goal of the nutrition “games with a purpose” project is to create web games that entice hundreds or thousands of people to play them regularly. But, there’s a catch. The games must be designed so that as people play them, they will incrementally create a massive, high-quality food/nutrition database. This database will be used by researchers to make novel health technologies. The games must be maddeningly engrossing but also encourage people to enter information on food packaging, such as UPC codes and product and Nutrition Facts labels … just for fun … and the game must self-validate that the information that people enter is correct.

If you are intereted in this project, here is a getting started exercise.

Exercise

To create these games, we need to be able to put infomration into a database and to pull information from the database. We need to store all the information on nutrition labels shown here:

Note that not all labels list all information. You might have to a look at a few labels to get the complete list of variables. Also, the ingredient list is of arbitrary length. We are also interested in the barcode (numbers, not image).

In order to create a game that gathers and stores this information, we need a way to store the information and retrieve it.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Create software accessible from any major web browser that can be used to enter and retrieve data from the database. It should have a structure similar to this sample design.

All it needs to do is allow entry and retrieval of information for foods, where someone can add new foods.

You do not need to create a game at this point, just show that you have all the pieces you need to layer a game on top of the basic database storage.

Your code must be able to output a csv file with all the nutrition information in the database in this format (although with many more columns): NutritionInfo.csv

Step 3:

Email Stephen Intille (...@neu.edu) your code with an explanation of how to set it up so he can try it (or have it all running on the web so he can try it from a browser) and a sample csv output file with complete data from at least 4 real food items.

If you wish to pursue further work on this project, we will work with you to develop a game idea that you will implement.

Questions?

Contact Stephen Intille (...@neu.edu)